moaned. She couldn’t face food this morning. Another afternoon and evening of solid drinking had left her feeling fragile.
She lit a cigarette, ignoring Meredith’s dire health warnings, had two puffs and tossed it into the fire. It tasted vile. She was almost forty now, she reminded herself. Time to give away childish things.
At the protesting squawk of camp chairs being folded, Annie winced. Meredith shook her head with shared exasperation. All hopes of a leisurely start had evaporated as soon as Nina had opened her eyes and realised it was Monday. A school day. By 7 am she had the fire blazing and a kettle boiling. By seven thirty she was rapping on aluminium and calling that breakfast was ready. Meredith had peered through the curtains and seen the campsite was still in shadow. The sun hadn’t even crested the hills across the lake. She wished Nina to hell and back. Annie groaned and buried her face in a fallow pillow.
Nina had apparently decided that, if she expended enough frenzied energy here this morning, it would somehow get the boys out the door in school uniform in time to catch the tram at home in East Malvern. The beauty of the morning mist rising majestically from the water didn’t rate a second look, nor did the crimson rosellas communing in the trees or the rock wallabies foraging in the dewy grass. They were all duly noted. Lovely. Time to move on.
‘Will you tell us, please, what is the hurry?’ Meredith pleaded as Nina scraped Annie’s breakfast into the fire and it hissed its disapproval. She and Annie had cold backsides from sitting on the wooden bench, and badly wanted their canvas camp chairs back so they could warm themselves by the fire with their coffee.
Nina didn’t stop to answer, but bent over the picnic table to clear butter, bread and a jar of her home-made raspberry jam. ‘The sooner we get this all packed away, the sooner we can get moving. I’ve looked at the map and we’ve got a fair drive,’ she announced and headed for the van.
‘How many days till we’re in Sydney?’ Annie called after her. Once inside, Nina packed away the breakfast things and then checked her mobile phone. Dead as the proverbial duck. She had to get reception so she could remind Brad that Anton and Marko were going on the school excursion to Canberra tomorrow and run through the checklist of what they needed to pack.
Nina marched back to the picnic table with her road map. ‘It’s sixteen hundred k’s to Sydney, roughly. If we just take it slowly we’ll have two more nights camping on the beach. I thought we’d stop here . . . and here.’ Nina pointed to the map without having any real idea of what was to be found beneath her fingertip. But it was all coastline and the names Bunga Head, Potato Point and Wreck Bay sounded promising enough. After all, who was she? Captain Frigging Cook?
Meredith, thankfully, didn’t demand any more details. She was up for it, though she would have liked to stay exactly where she was for the whole two weeks. Maybe there was another wily black bream in the reeds waiting to be enticed by a tasty prawn. She could really become addicted to this whole fishing thing. It was a pity that they were driving towards Byron and everything that had to be dealt with there.
‘If we’re going through Sydney, why don’t we stop and have dinner with Corinne?’ suggested Annie.
Corinne! Her name reverberated in the silence as if a rifle had been fired across the lake. Annie turned, half expecting to see a flight of ducks take to the sky.
Meredith dumped her coffee cup on the splintery table. ‘We are NOT going to see that tart.’
Annie was surprised at Meredith’s vehemence. ‘Oh, come on, it’d be fun. Even more of a reunion,’ she cajoled.
‘It could be the chance of a lifetime,’ added Nina, who was thinking that their chances of getting Corinne to come to dinner were probably nil, but that she’d love to hear her dish the gossip on the people she read about in the glossy magazines.
‘Are you forgetting how she double-crossed us?’ Meredith stared at them both.
‘That was twenty years ago!’ exclaimed Annie. ‘Time to move on, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, well, she certainly moved on . . . at our expense, I remind you. And you are NOT suggesting that we drive this vehicle into the heart of Double